Who are you when you stop becoming?

It is common in social groups to give a role to a given person.

A role is a box. A safe, bounded, predictable box.

The mind is a sophisticated categorizing, perimeter and box constructing machine.

It draws divisions on the continuous to create order, logic and reason.

Once a box is drawn around something or someone, the mind is set at ease.

It no longer says: “What is this?”

Instead it says: “I know”.

Everything today seems to come with a number attached.

Followers, likes, watch time, sentiment scores, even influence itself, quantified and ranked.

What would happen if we took all of that away?

This episode is an open inquiry into a world that has learned to measure almost everything, told through verse, and what the implications may be.

The story of a decade long, still unresolved fight to quit social media, from deleting Facebook in university to running Instagram ads for a DJ business years later. A honest look at notification loops, comparison, and what it actually costs to live inside the attention economy, even when you know exactly how it works.

Several months ago I became a bit obsessed with understanding Human Design (HD), a neo-typology that has emerged in the last 40 years combining Jewish Kabbalah with the Chinese I Ching and Vedic Astrology.

While I do wonder if it was an immaculate conception born of counter culture in the bohemian refuge of 1970s Ibiza (the founder “Ra Uru Hu” lived there during his “revelation”), it has stimulated me into trying to live in a more embodied way.

That is, to make decisions with an additional body level awareness rather than exclusively from the mind. Through my explorations, I discovered Jenna Zoe’s podcast “Align” where she shared a fascinating tool for decision making that I wanted to share with you today.

The quiet voice in my head hummed along as I walked.

Notice the “I” and the “Me”.

Pay attention to the "Me"

In a dream-like state, the sound of my footsteps down Fillmore street filled my ears with a predicable click and clack noise providing a background note for the inward process that was taking place. A process in which I found myself catching each and every thought that the mind attempted to race after, having sprung free like a jailbroken convict.

Jung personified that place, the Shadow, which Robert Johnson playfully describes as: “[the] unconscious dumping ground for undesirable characteristics of a personality”

As a collective, we’ve developed different sanctioned places for those parts of ourselves, and for me, that’s always been fitness and performance training. The gym has always been the place to find comfort in breaking myself down and vocalizing parts of myself that I don’t often express.

From long distance running to Olympic Weightlifting, yoga and later martial arts, I think most physical practices I’ve experimented with seriously, belong in some way, shape or form to a place in my psyche I call “The Ministry of Self Improvement”; it’s run by my favourite little tyrant: the silhouette that clings to my feet, and matches my every step.

I laid on the floor in a heavy state as a dark wave of depressive fatigue and heaviness washed over me.

A massive pressure weighed on my head, and that characteristic optimism telling me there is always a way out, reframe or way to step back to see the bigger picture, seemed to be failing me. I didn’t see a way out of what was happening to me: the seeming hell of a mind viciously swirling in an anxious and disturbed spiral; the same hell that Vipassana meditations had so kindly reacquainted me to several months prior in Koh Phangan.

Yet, I was frozen and encroaching into deeper and darker psychological ground. Luckily, having been introduced to Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, I had a new vocabulary for these occasional emotional overloads; at this very moment, I was firmly in the grips of a firefighter shutdown.

In this side quest, Robert unpacks the chaotic, messy, and deeply human struggle at the intersection of ego, detachment, and higher minded ideals.

Starting with a late-night standoff with a spider, Robert discusses internal conflict between three distinct modes of being that we all cycle through:

The Personal Ego: Our defensive, flawed nature trying to get ahead.

The Spiritual Ego ("The Yogic Doormat"): The exhausting pursuit of endless compliance that often leads to self-abandonment.

The Zen Perspective: The liberating realization that life is a bit of a joke, and we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously.

We look at why modern therapeutic clichés like "protecting your peace" can feel hollow, why you have to build an ego before you can dissolve it, and how the Buddhist Two-Truths doctrine helps us navigate our own hypocrisy. Ultimately, it’s a reflection on forgiveness, learning to extend the same radical compassion to ourselves that we try to give to the world.

We stood facing the water basins as faux candles let out a soft glimmer in the dark room. Like a 1500s secret Gregorian chanting chamber (or potential incognito cult initiation), four rows of partnered pairs stood above individual plunging pools as sweat dripped off our bodies from the prior sauna session. Inhaling and exhaling deeply into the diaphragm we stared directly into our apparent fate: ice water.

Drawing on Sherry Turkle's observation that smartphone-raised kids "know how to be lonely, but not how to be alone," this episode explores what Jungian psychology calls the vas hermeticum, and it's antithesis the validation hole.

The validation hole represents the impulse to reach for our devices the moment internal tension rises, bleeding pressure through likes, comments, and digital echo chambers before it can do its alchemical work.

To illustrate the alternative, the episode turns to Jung himself, who built the Bollingen Tower on Lake Zurich without electricity, running water, or a telephon, a literal stone container where he sat with half-formed ideas, chopped his own wood, and endured the discomfort of his own mind long enough to produce some of his most profound work.

The takeaway: we aren't starved for meaning because we lack information, but because we've lost the psychological containment required to let raw experience cook into something real.